Mumbai, India – Hindi is the most spoken language in India, most of its speakers concentrated in the northern regions. But this year, the states of the south and western India have always slipped left on the language, joked an actor with a crowded auditorium in Mumbai at the end of July. The public, predominantly marathi, understood the reference to meeting applications and burst out laughing.
The debate around the Indian language and identity has deepened in daily conversation. During the last year, the state after the state of this vast country declared that they would favor their local languages on the teaching of Hindi to primary and secondary students, to the great dismay of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who insisted that the Hindi is compulsory for primary students across the country. Modi has put pressure for a Hindu nation, and his party thinks that an ideal Indian should be Hindu and capable of speaking Hindi. Critics condemn this decision as a threat to India’s linguistic diversity.
The last state to join the train against the Hindi movement is the southern state of Karnataka, where Kannada is the most spoken language. In early August, a high -level commission recommended that Kannada or the child’s mother tongue be taught with English. Currently, most public schools teach English, Hindi and other local mother languages.
About 780 languages and dialects are spoken in this country of 1.4 billion people, according to the popular linguistic survey of India. English was used as a bridge language for official and administrative purposes since India’s independence in 1947.
“This recent debate is not a question of the teaching of Hindi in schools,” explains Akshya Saxena, professor at the University of Vanderbilt who studies Indian languages. It’s about finding a national identity.
“As you can see, this battle takes place between political parties,” she said. “No parent, student or teacher talks about it.”
Hindi and Indian identity
According to the Bharatiya Janata of Modi party, the ideal Indian citizen is an Hindi Hindu, known as Dhirendra Jha, who has sought and wrote several books on Hindu supremacist ideology in India.
The roots of this ideology date back to the beginning of the 20th century, before India was released from British colonial domination. Despite the linguistic diversity of the subcontinent, the predominant anti-colonial party, the Party of the Indian National Congress, proposed the Hindi as a national language because it was the dominant language of party leaders. This effort led to the reaction of political leaders at all levels, including within the party.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parental organization of the Modi BJP, which opposed the Congress Party, pushed to the Hindi as a national language. The RSS needed a liaison language to propagate its ideology. The group adopted Hindi, said Jha, and he stayed.
“Language is culture, it is history, it is an identity,” explains Saxena.
The debate around languages to be prioritized was long. The authors of the Constitution finally decided to adapt to all major languages, but Hindi and English were adopted as official languages at the national level. Each state, he decided, would also have its own official language.
Now, said Jha, the situation is a “Hornet nest”.
Saxena says that the BJP wrongly considers the Hindi language as a monolith, but in reality, the Hindi dialects bleed in each other.
“It is not a question of imposing the Hindi,” she says. “It is a question of imposing a particular type of Hindi.”
The version favored by the BJP is based on Sanskrit words and eliminates Persian, Arab and Ourdou influences, known as Saxena.
Imposing what the party considers as a “pure” Hindi is a religious and political project, she says. It is not even a version of the language that people speak in the streets.
Where it all started
In February, the Indian Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan said that the southern state of Tamil Nadu would not receive 2,000 crores of Indian rupees ($ 227 million) in federal and secondary funds if he did not teach Hindi in his schools.
Pradhan continued by saying that the 2020 national education policy obliges teaching in Hindi in schools. But a close reading of politics shows that it simply recommends that students learn three languages, at least two of which should be “from India”. The minister then specified that the NEP does not impose the Hindi, after all. But the cat had come out of the bag.
Salem Dharanidharan, the national spokesperson for the DMK party, which governs Tamil Nadu, called it “blackmail” and declared that his party would resist taxation. Tamil Nadu, where Modi’s party has never owned power, has always been at the forefront of the battle against Hindi.
“NEP is only that: a policy. He can only make recommendations, ”explains Alok Prasanna Kumar, lawyer and former head of the Karnataka team at the Think Tank Vidhi Center for Legal Policy in Karnataka. “In addition, this does not impose the teaching of a language, not to mention the Hindi.”
The Tamil Nadu has not changed its policy and no penalty has yet been taken.
The Karnataka and the Tamil Nadu are both governed by parts who oppose Modi’s BJP. But opposition to what is called “Hindi imposition” is the strongest in the state of Maharashtra, which is governed by a coalition led by the BJP.
The situation of the Maharashtra
In April, the heads of state of the Maharashtra declared that the Hindi would be made of the third compulsory language in all public schools.
“There should be a single language for communication across the country,” said Maharashtra’s chief minister, becomes Fadnavis.
Almost immediately, the opposition parties aggressively rejected, calling politics an attack on the marathi language. They argued that even if they are Hindu, they do not feel the need to learn Hindi to prove their patriotism.
Pressure forced the government to withdraw politics.
But in June, the Maharashtra government said that the Hindi would not be compulsory but would be “generally” taught from classes one to five. The opposition parties said that it was a way to introduce Hindi into schools via a stolen door after the initial state backtrack.
“Language is the last border,” says Jha. “While Hindu domination is easier to distribute across the country, imposing a language on various populations can be the place where Hindu supremacist leaders see the most difficult resistance.”
They could even lose the battle, he adds.
In early July, the opposition parties led by Shiva Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena said they were going down to the street to protest against politics. Before they couldn’t, the state removed it.
“We will close the schools,” said Raj Thackeray, the MNS chief, “if the Hindi is imposed.”